I am too tired to get my Irish up tonight. Yesterday seven of my classmates and I worked a twelve hour hospital shift, and were still required to get up early today to attend a special class. Sometimes these things happen, so it was not the class that bothered me but the fact that, if my Well-Respected Nursing Program had the proper number of clinical instructors and a better sense of how to run a nursing program generally, we would have had an eight hour shift yesterday, a day to study for our upcoming leadership exam, and another eight hour shift tomorrow, fulfilling both our need for study time, our requirements for a certain number of clinical hours, and our apparently ludicrous expectation that these hours would take place in an actual hospital.
Instead, we attended an eight hour discussion of why hospital births and pain meds are the devil and home births are the duty of every modern woman. Now, as both a modern woman and a modern medical consumer (and most importantly someone paying large sums of money for a supposedly quality education), I expect to be given information by my instructors in an unbiased format, or at least both sides of a controversial argument.
It is clear there are many good things to say for a midwife-assisted home birth, a birthing center birth, or even a midwife-attended hospital birth, but equally clear that the arguments "this is how women have done it for centuries," and "in 1900 almost all births were home births" are inadequate to support a valid practice. Women and infants have also died in childbirth by the thousands for centuries, and as a friend pointed out, in 1900 almost everyone also had poor dental hygiene, but we don't consider this to be a good thing.
The fact that technology can be brought to intervene in a natural biological process does not make the use of that technology necessary or sometimes even optimal, but it absolutely does not mean that it should not be used. Surgery used to be done with a swig of rum instead of anaesthesia; that doesn't mean we should go back to basics with that. Children used to get the measles right and left but no one is advocating for little red spots either. Sonograms, amniocentesis, and genetic screening are all recent editions to pregnancy but the latter two are invaluable tools when conceiving and carrying a child, and Facebook is nauseatingly plastered with proof of the world's adoration of sonograms. So why the insistence on rejection of modern options for birth?
I do not suggest that every woman who gets pregnant should be summarily C-Sectioned so they can make their 4:30 hair appointment. Many women are perfectly capable of giving birth with minimal, if any, intervention, and in their home if they so choose. It is not unreasonable for a healthy, low-risk mother of one or two to decide she is ready to go au naturale on the next baby, and this should be encouraged for all kinds of reasons (personal comfort, financial, family bonding, keeping healthy people out of the hospital, etc.). But there is absolutely, positively, under no circumstances, ANY EXCUSE whatsoever to present hospital birth as some sort of aberration.
A recent film by a C-list celebrity explores the touchy-feely-magical lifegiver side of birth, and lays it on pretty thick against anyone who would even remotely consider the idea of an induction, C-Section, Pitocin-assisted labor, or a medical degree in the room. The single doctor interviewed who supported hospital births was made to look like the sort of person who would prescribe laudanum for a woman with the hysterical vapors. At the opposite end of the spectrum was a man who genuinely voiced the opinion, and I am not exaggerating, that receiving an epidural renders a mother and baby unable to love each other properly.
Now, my mother had me naturally, but received epidurals with both of my brothers, and certainly does not love them any less, or any differently. I guarantee if she is ever annoyed with one of them it is because he has left piles of moldy dishes in his room, not because she had an epidural twenty-odd years ago at his birth. Moreover, I also have a stepmother who loves us totally and unconditionally without us ever occupying her womb. Both she and my mother would quite cheerfully kill anyone who suggested that they didn't love us correctly because they did not have an authentic log cabin, peat fire, grannie-delivered birth. Furthermore, there are millions of adoptive parents and billions of fathers all over the globe who love their sons and daughters with every fiber of their being (my father included) and they clearly did not physically birth these offspring.
Birth IS an emotional experience for the parents, a major change in the life of the family, and an intense physiological process. It is not, however, magical or mystical or some mysterious thing to which only certain women have the secret key, and which modern medicine and the Male Establishment have ripped from them. It is not necessary to treat it as a medical emergency (although some can be), and the woman as an ill patient, because pregnancy and birth are not afflictions, but neither should we reject all modern medical resources simply because chimpanzees struggle to bond with infants born via medical intervention (another fine scientific opinion offered in this film, despite the little-known fact that the simian spine is configured differently than a human's to permit far easier birth, and the more obvious fact that chimps do lots of things humans don't do, like eating lice and throwing poop).
Having teeth is not a medical affliction either, but I still see the dentist in her office rather than my bathroom. And if I do need work done, I want her to use Novacaine, not just climb in there with a pair of horse calipers. It seems quite logical that using the tools at one's disposal, as and when they are helpful, is a sensible thing to do, whether that tool is an ordinary one for a mundane task, or a complex one for an involved process like delivering a baby.
In summary, does it matter, one woman's foolishness? No, but it wasted my day and that of fifteen of my cohorts, all of whom also have a leadership exam on Friday, eight of whom have to get up at 4am tomorrow for their twelve hour shift, and at least one of whom has given birth via C-Section and does not struggle in any way to love her children. It also demonstrates the flaws inherent in my Well-Respected Nursing Program, which sadly all of us are now simply too exhausted to fight. The End.
